From james.davidson@eng.sun.com Sat Jul 8 21:46:03 2000
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Date: Sat, 08 Jul 2000 14:46:00 -0700
Subject: Re: [spinnaker] Announce
From: James Duncan Davidson
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on 7/8/00 12:22 AM, Andy Clark at andyc@apache.org wrote:
> I would like to know who the "XML team at Sun" is.
The visible to the outside people are:
Myself
Ed Goei
Rajiv Mordani
Costin Manaloche
Then there are people behind the scenes that do QA, Docs, and all that other
stuff. The manager of the team is Jim Driscoll, whos boss is Connie Weiss,
whos boss is Jeff Jackson whos boss is, well, that's to the director level
at least. :)
> I've checked the previous commit messages and only saw the initial checkin of
> the Crimson DOM and some metric test files.
Yep. We've been spending the last 6 months trying to figure out how the hell
to move forward with this codebase in a way that satisfies our constraints.
We played around with lots of different ideas that we could dive in and
start developing with. You don't see any checkins because we didn't have any
substantial things that could pan out for our uses. But Ed, Rajiv, and
Costin know both the Crimson and Xerces source bases and could give you
details of the positives and negatives of each.
It wasn't a small step in committing to looking far into the future instead
of the here and know, but you have to understand what we're looking for in a
parser. I *has* to run well on JDK 1.3/1.4. It has to have a reasonably
small memory runtime as any parser we put into the JDK will end up in TV
sets eventually. And our team has to feel comfortable with maintaining the
code. They have to understand what things do, or be able to immediatly so
that issues can be resolved.
> Are the checkins from the xml-contrib module going to the CVS mailing list? I
> must be overlooking something.
Yes, the xml-contrib-cvs mailing list. It was set up as a different mailing
list by Dirk when he set up the contrib space to put Crimson into a while
ago. It's unfortunate that it goes off into a different mailing list.
> There doesn't seem to be any commits on the main branch of the source code,
> though.
There aren't. I put this over in xml-contrib to highlight the fact that this
is experimental. An incubator. A future peice of code that might not live to
see the light of day. There's a paper that I wrote called "Rules for
Revolutionaries" back when we were sorting out the painful process of how to
let new generations of codebases come along when they needed to rather than
just iterative generations. Turns out that all we had to do was look no
further than the httpd project which set out in a similar fashion a while
ago for the 2.0 server, and only now is starting to release betas of what
will be the next Apache web server. Lots of twists and turns. Lots of
experiements that shouldn't have happened in the main source tree (not even
on a branch -- branches will limit the amount of code refactoring that you
are willing to do).
> Is it possible that, in the future, we hear about submissions
> to the tree *before* everyone goes home on Friday? I want us
> all to work together on the future of the Xerces parser instead
> of being surprised by a new source tree over a weekend.
Pppht. This is open source, Apache style. People work whenever they work and
that's the way this all works. Most Apache developers don't work on the main
sources during the typcial M-F 8-4(local time) window. They work when they
get time, or the muse is with them, or whatever. There are no limits, it's a
24/7 shop and to be blunt, conformance with a corporate schedule isn't part
of the mandate.
Secondly, you may ask why didn't we talk about this before we did it. We'll,
I've never beleived in starting out too small. If you start out too small,
you kind of get lost. If you start out strong, well, you can get momentum
built. Just talking without setting up the code tree would have been, well,
pointless. As developers we know code, we speak code.
Third, if you take a look, it's hardly a new source tree. There's a very few
utility items that I've moved into place. It'll build over time. Many
months. It's not going to happen instantaneously.
.duncan